Film critic Joseph Gelmis became one of 2001's most
ardent and insightful supporters -- but he didn't start out that way. What
follows are the three reviews he published in the daily paper Newsday
following 2001's opening in New York, which detail his personal
odyssey....

Space Odyssey Fails Most Gloriously

(From Newsday, April 4, 1968)

Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick's brilliance and egotism have
goaded him into trying to surpass the originality, audacity and
prophecies of his Dr. Strangelove. His immense talent and
vaulting conceit have produced in 2001: A Space Odyssey one
of the most bizarre movies ever made.

The preparations for this ambitious evolutionary allegory
about the origins and destinations of mankind began shortly
after the opening four years ago of Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick's
black comedy about the end of the world. By conventional
standards of drama, this new film is, I suppose, a spectacular,
glorious failure.

But I'm not completely sure that ordinary standards may
be applied to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although it is dramatically
disjointed and pretentious, its special effects create
their own other-worldly reality and put it in a class of its own
where there are no standards against which it can properly be
judged. It exists on its own terms as a unique experience.

The Stanley Kubrick-Arthur Clarke screenplay is an expansion of
a Clarke short story, "The Sentinel," about the discovery
upon the Moon of a signal-beacon left by a superior alien race as an
alarm to alert them when humans evolved enough to leave
Earth and grope toward space.

In the film, the alien (which looks, through man's limited
senses, like a black tabletop on end) acts like a midwife in the
evolution of man. Running three hours, with an internmssion,
the film is a saga of evolution, from Leakey's man-apes to
modern man in the 21st century and, finally, to a new (unspecified)
stage of development. The alien is there to inspire each
change.

This mysterious slab appears on Earth among the apes at the
dawn of man, on the Moon when modern man is on the threshold of
discovering how he fits into the universe, in orbit around
Jupiter, and at the foot of the symbolic deathbed, where the
contemporary race of men is to pass on into the next evolutionary stage.
The slab seems to represent for Kubrick the Life
Force, or an Evolutionary Principle, or God, or an Alien Superthing
weaning humanity in various rebirths.

In its space-travel special effects, 2001: A Space Odyssey is
an unparalleled movie spectacle. Every minute detail of the
operation routine of the Earth-shuttle, the Hilton Space Station,
the moon ferry, the moon base and the interplanetary
spaceship is shown matter-of-factly. The sets, constructed
with the technical assistance of major corporations, are the
most realistic and functional ever seen in science-fiction films
In scenes like the one in which the camera follows Gary
Lockwood around and around in a continuous circle as he does
his daily exercises by jogging along the floor and up the ceiling
with his magnetic shoes, Kubrick stunningly establishes a way
and rhythm of life that seem commonplace in the context of his
remarkable film but that in fact will not exist anywhere outside
the film for decades.

There are convincingly real sequences with Keir Dullea and
Gary Lockwood floating outside the spaceship doing repair
work. If the rest of the film were as good as the special effects
2001: A Space Odyssey would be a masterpiece. a classic. Instead, it is,
as a whole, disappointingly confusing, disjointed, and unsatisfying.

Because its characters are standardized, bland, depersonalized
near-automatons who have surrendered their humanity
the computers, the film is antidramatic and thus self-defeating.
It moves at a slow, smug pace. It is patronizingly pedantic in
some of its earnest history lessons. And while it dazzles
the eye, it offends the ear with one of the worst soundtracks
made.

Kubrick uses The Blue Danube to emphasize how men have
turned the awesomeness of space travel to a banal commutter
chore where the passengers nap or eat or read. The waltz,
used to indicate mankind's going around in circles, is
an ironic counterpoint to the sexual imagery of the shuttlerocket
coupling with the space-station (as Kubrick used a romantic song
as the background for the air-to-air refueling in
Dr. Strangelove). But the whole thing is overdone and tiresome,
as are all the other sound effects.

The film jarringly mixes clinical realism with metaphysical
allegory. It abandons plot for symbol.

The ultrarealistic trip from the moon to Jupiter in search of
aliens turns out.to be an allegorical evolutionary trip. Dullea,
as Everyman, wars with his computer to regain control of his
destiny. In his ship, Discovery, Dullea seems ready to land on
Jupiter but on his way he encounters the black slab and passes
through a mind-expanding psychedelic experience, with
kaleidoscopic arrangements of lights and colors. Then his ship, which
is shaped like a spermatozoon, is symbolically united with the
planet (i.e., his destination, mankind's goal).

And suddenly he has landed not on the planet but in the
future, in an eerie room, where, as the symbol of al1 mankind,
he grows old and, on his deathbed, reaches out to the
Evolutionary Principle, which assists him to evolve into the next
higher stage of development, an infant. The evolution appears
to be a biblical allusion about how one must be reborn as a
child before being allowed to enter the kingdom of heaven.

The film jumps erratically. The episodes aren't structured
logically until the very last moments of the film. It is a mistake.
Instead of suspense, there is surprise and confusion, and, for
many, resentment.

Another Look at Space Odyssey

(From Newsday, April 20, 1968)

About 100 years ago Moby Dick was eloquently damned and
devastatingly dismissed by one of Britain's most influential and
erudite literary critics. He argued persuasively that the book
was a preposterous grab-bag. He ridiculed its self-indulgent
lyricism and poetic mysticism. He said it was an unconditional
failure because it didn't follow the accepted canons of how a
19th century novel should be written. He was impeccably correct.
Yet today there are perhaps a half-dozen scholars who can
recall the critic's name, while every college freshman knows the
name of the maligned novelist.

A professional critic is sometimes trapped by his own need
for convenient categories, canons and conventions. He can't
operate from day to day in a vacuum. So he builds an aesthetic
frame of reference, a value system, to give him standards by
which he can judge each new film. He approaches a film with
preconceptions about what form it should have. He is the upholder
of the familiar, the promoter of the status quo.

When a film of such extraordinary originality as Stanley Kubrick's
2001:A Space Odyssey comes along it upsets the members of
the critical establishment because it exists outside their
framework of apprehending and describing movies. They are
threatened. Their most polished puns and witticisms are useless,
because the conventional standards don't apply. They need an
innocent eye, an unconditioned reflex and a flexible vocabulary.
With one exception (The New Yorker's Penelope Gilliatt), the
daily and weekly reviewers offhandedly dismissed the film as a
disappointment or found it an ambitious failure.

In my own review, I wrote: "By conventional standards of
drama, this new film is, I suppose, a spectacular, glorious fail-
ure. But I'm not completely sure that ordinary standards may
fairly be applied to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although it is
dramatically disjointed and pretentious, its special effects cre-
ate its own otherworldly reality and put it in a class of its own
where there are no standards against which it can properly be
judged. It exists on its own terms as a unique experience."

I had struggled, on deadline, with the initial review, writing
and rewriting it three times. It never said quite what I had
hoped to say. Basically, I wanted to call it a fascinating film that
didn't work. Then I read the other reviews and they were almost all guilty,
as the villains in Kubrick's own Dr. Strangelove were, of a hysterical overkill.

One of the axioms of the movie-reviewing dodge is that if
you don't flip over a film the first time, forget it, because neither
will the audience. An audience gets just one chance to see a
film, so it has to make its points as clearly and as quickly as
possible. For purely economic reasons, this is especially true
when the film is a $12,000,000 Cinerama adventure epic which
must appeal to a mass audience to recoup its investment.

I went back to see the film again, anyway. I suspected that
the critical overkill was a symptom of a nervous reaction not
unlike the 19th-century literary critic's hostility to a new form
that threatened the assumptions of his expertise.

After seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey a second time, I'm convinced
it is a masterwork. Take it from one who mistrusts superlatives
and who suspects that most critics who second-guess
themselves are grandstanding: this awesome film is light-years
ahead of any science fiction you have ever seen and owes more
the mystical visions of Jung and William Blake than to H.G.
Wells or Jules Verne.

The problem in recommending 2001: A Space Odyssey is
implying that it may not fall into place for you until the second
viewing. And that's asking, perhaps, too much stamina and
cash outlay in the case of a three-hour (with intermission)
reserved-seat film with admission costing more than $3 a person.
The alternative may be to find out in detail what is going to happen,
so you will be less concerned with the apparent adventure
and more aware of the nitty-gritty details.

Kubrick's depersonalized human beings are antidramatic and
that is cinematically self-defeating. The pace is so leisurely and
the characters so uninteresting that you may become impatient
to get on with the plot. You may, as I did, want to sacrifice the
minute details of the operation of the spaceship. But it is
precisely this cumulative weight of having experienced a kind of
living hell with Keir Dullea that makes the symbolic rebirth of
his automaton Everyman of the 21st Century so profoundly
stirring and such a joyous reaffirmation of life.

The film failed as drama the first viewing because it did not
keep me spellbound. The tedium was the message. But the
vision of space-age humanity being just a bone's throw away from
prehistoric man didn't seem structurally related to the rest of
he film until the final scenes. It was unemotionally realistic, and
hen suddenly Kubrick sprung his allegorical surprises on us.

Because Kubrick uses surprise, rather than suspense, the
film is full of sequences that seem too long or confusing, until
they are seen in context a second time. Alfred Hitchcock, the
master of the milieu, says that for suspense the public "has to
be made perfectly aware of all the facts involved." In a mystery
or whodunit, he says, "there is no suspense, but a sort of
intellectual puzzle. The whodunit generates the kind of curiosity
that is void of emotion, and emotion is an essential ingredient
of suspense."

The prologue with the man-apes and the epilogue with the evolution
of the star-baby are two of the most riveting and exhilarating emotional
moments in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The special effects, particularly Dullea
floating in mid-air while performing a lobotomy on the computer HAL after
its nervous breakdown, are remarkable. Since the film opened at New York's
Capitol Theatre, Kubrick has trimmed about 19 minutes to speed the action
and he has reduced the piercing soundtrack level and added two titles to
set the place of the action more clearly. They are the only concessions he
has made in a film which uncompromisingly demands acceptance on its own
unique terms.

Understanding the Message of 2001

(From Newsday, April 5, 1969)

Stanley Kubrick's 2001:A Space Odyssey is such an extraordinary
film,
that often now when I read a piece of cultural
criticism, there are passages which seem to have almost been
written in direct response to the film.

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan says, "The
artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge
decades before its transforming impact occurs. He the
builds models or Noah's Arks for facing the change that is
hand." The odd spermatozoon-shaped spaceship, The Discovery, in 2001 is
a kind of ark.

"The artist," says McLuhan, "is the man in any field, scientific
or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions
and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral
awareness."

McLuhan speaks of art as "precise advance knowledge of
how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of
annexed technology" and of the need to "begin a translation
new art forms into social navigation charts." McLuhan adds
"I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly
seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange
one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from
our own extended faculties."

The relevance of 2001 in light of McLuhan's theories is
staggering. But no more so than the insight into the film one
gets from reading The Savage and Beautiful Country by the
British Jungian psychiatrist Alan McGlashan. The Savage and
Beautiful Country (Houghton Miflin) has had a profound
influence on my own life and is one of the most significant
prophetic works of the decade. Both McLuhan's and McGlashan's
books appeared before 2001 was released in 1968.

In his foreword, McGlashan says that the purpose of his book
is to indicate a new direction of perception: "An almost
perceptive inner change -- a willed suspension of conventional judgments,
a poised still awareness, a stillness in which
long-smothered voices that speak the language of the soul can
heard again.

"To suggest that mankind is on the verge of a crucial psychic
mutation, a breakthrough to an enhanced personality that can
grasp without flinching the formidable values of an inner world
while retaining its intellectual grip on externalities -- is to sail
extremely close to the wind."

He suggests that Nietzsche glimpsed the truth, which hadn't
been forcefully promoted since Pythagoras, that what was
needed was not another new philosophy, but that "man should
surpass himself." And in 2001 the evolutionary stepups move
on up from Leakey's man-ape to the current species of homo
sapiens to the newborn star-baby in a cocoon -- an infant angel,
or superman.

Says McGlashan, "The brain, Bergson believes, limits man's
conscious awareness of the exterior world to what is practically
useful....Yet one may not reproach the human brain for its
ruthless censorship of (other) perceptions. Consciousness has
quite enough of a job mediating, like a harassed traffic policeman,
between the hostile environment and the precarious spark
of individual life which it guards -- without being simultaneously
distracted by data arriving from beyond space and time.

"This may, in fact, be the secret of the incalculable strength
of the 'common-sense' attitude.... Busy life simply cannot
afford the time to listen too raptly to the faint voices hailing him
from far beyond the boundaries of his own demanding world."